Creationism Refuted - Hominin Footprints - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated.
A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.

© Kay Behrensmeyer

Reconstruction of Parathropus boisei from holotype specimen OH5

By Daderot - Own work, CC0, Link

Fossil footprints show large body size and group dynamics in 1.4-million-year-old human relatives | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.

At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.

As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Palaeoecological reconstruction of the Carboniferous stem-insect Chosha praecursor

From: Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al (32026)

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - The Slow Evolution and Extinction Of African Megafauna - Over 23 Million Years

Modern African megafauna

A selection of extinct African megaherbivores

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Scarce emergence of new species drove the decline of African megaherbivores | Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales

Africa’s elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are surviving representatives of a much richer assemblage of giant herbivores that once included such animals as Deinotherium, an elephant relative with downward-curving tusks, and the pig-like anthracotheres, relatives of modern hippopotamuses. These animals were not merely conspicuous members of their ecosystems. As “ecosystem engineers”, megaherbivores—here defined as herbivorous mammals weighing at least one tonne—alter vegetation, disperse seeds, open pathways, create water holes and redistribute nutrients.

Why so much of this diversity disappeared has usually been approached as a question of extinction. Large animals reproduce slowly, require extensive habitats and comparatively large quantities of food, so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they must have been especially vulnerable when climates and environments changed. Human hunting has also figured prominently in explanations of the much more recent global disappearance of large mammals.

But the diversity of any group depends upon two processes, not one. Extinction removes species, while speciation produces new ones. Even a lineage with a comparatively modest extinction rate will decline if its species disappear faster than evolutionary divergence can replace them. Conversely, a group can withstand relatively frequent extinctions if new species continue to arise sufficiently rapidly.

A new study published open access in Nature Communications. has now examined both sides of that evolutionary balance. Juan L. Cantalapiedra and colleagues analysed 3,327 African fossil occurrences representing 396 species of herbivorous mammals. Using neural-network models, they reconstructed changes in speciation and extinction over the past 23 million years while considering body size, tooth-crown height, evolutionary relationships and environmental change. Their results challenge the apparently obvious assumption that Africa’s largest herbivores declined because they were inherently more prone to extinction.

In fact, the models indicate that extinction rates were generally somewhat lower among the largest species. High-crowned teeth, which better withstand abrasive diets, were also associated with a reduced risk of extinction. The underlying problem for megaherbivores was that their already low speciation rates could not compensate for the species that were lost.

The imbalance developed over millions of years. As Africa became increasingly arid from about 7.2 million years ago, both speciation and extinction initially accelerated as changing vegetation and expanding open habitats reorganised its ungulate communities. Speciation then levelled off after about 3.6 million years, while extinction continued to rise and increased sharply with the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 2.58 million years ago. During the driest intervals, smaller herbivores generated new species at substantially higher rates, whereas speciation among megaherbivores was suppressed still further. The resulting decline was already well under way long before humans possessed the technology needed to hunt such enormous animals systematically.

This does not mean that humans played no part in the most recent losses, nor that climate alone explains every extinction. Rather, it places recent events within a much longer evolutionary history in which changing climate, declining ecosystem productivity, extinction and unequal rates of speciation gradually transformed the African fauna.

Refuting Creationism - Dinosaurs Digging Pits In Bolivia - 67 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Oblique view of the lower part of the surface from the east, showing the general extent of the exposed palaeosurface. People for scale. Red arrow indicates the pit.

From: Meyer CA, Heymann JH, Ibarra EC, Flores EL, Sciscio L (2026)

Artistic reconstruction of the Mullurina Mayu bowl-shaped depression during the Late Cretaceous, depicting the probable tracemakers responsible for the Calorckosauripus trackways and possibly the bowl-shaped depression.

Illustration by Joshua Knüppe.

A Cretaceous Cold Case: The mysterious affair at Mullurina Mayu (Bolivia) | Blog

Some 67 million years before creationists believe their god created Earth during its mythical six-day “Creation Week”, a group of enormous, long-necked dinosaurs walked across the soft mud beside a river or lake in what is now Bolivia. At least one large animal may also have stopped to scrape repeatedly at the ground, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression surrounded by grooves and possible claw marks. Whether it was preparing a nest, digging for water or mineral salts, or doing something else entirely is uncertain, but the marks it left behind provide a rare glimpse of dinosaur behaviour shortly before the end of the Cretaceous Period.

The evidence comes from the Mullurina Mayu locality in the Maragua region, about 23 kilometres west of Sucre, Bolivia. There, an exposed surface of Maastrichtian-age claystone in the Lower Member of the El Molino Formation preserves several trackways attributed to titanosaurian sauropods. The tracks have been assigned to the trace-fossil species Calorckosauripus lazari, believed to have been made by comparatively non-derived titanosaurs.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Fossil Record, Christian A. Meyer, Jose Hugo Heymann, Edwin Chuca Ibarra, Eddy Laura Flores and Lara Sciscio have described an unusual structure preserved among those trackways. It is an irregular, bowl-shaped hollow measuring approximately 4.2 by 3.2 metres and reaching about 60 centimetres in depth. Around its walls are bundles of parallel grooves, roughly one centimetre wide and up to about 30 centimetres long, together with broader marks on the floor that may have been made by claws.

Creationism Refuted - Most Complete Fossil Early Canid - From 30 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mesocyon coryphaeus in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Mesocyon coryphaeus hunting.

Image credit: Roger Witter

Most complete skeleton of 30 million-year-old dog discovered | University of Michigan News

My last blog post concerned a 210-million-year-old, gap-filling dinosaur from Zimbabwe that is helping palaeontologists to reconstruct the early evolution and dispersal of dinosaurs.

This post concerns another gap-filling fossil, although one from much closer to the present—just 30 million years ago. It is a remarkably complete skeleton of the early canid Mesocyon coryphaeus, one of the most complete pre-Ice Age canid skeletons yet found in North America.

This specimen fills a different sort of gap. Mesocyon coryphaeus, first named in 1879, is relatively common in the John Day Formation of Oregon, but it was previously known principally from skulls and teeth. Its postcranial skeleton—the bones behind the skull—had remained almost entirely unknown. The new specimen therefore fills an important anatomical gap in our understanding of how early canids moved, hunted and responded to the changing environments of Oligocene North America.

The fossil itself has had a curious history. It was collected during the late 1980s from land administered by the Bureau of Land Management near what is now the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Encased in a protective plaster jacket, it entered the monument’s collection after initially being mistaken for an oreodont—an extinct North American even-toed ungulate sometimes loosely described as resembling a mixture of sheep, camel and pig.

During the 1990s, the skull was separated from the surrounding rock for display, whereupon its teeth and cranial anatomy revealed that it was actually a canid. Park palaeontologists began exposing the remainder of the skeleton in 2012, but preparation continued intermittently for years. By the time the fossil was fully uncovered in 2022, more than 500 hours of painstaking preparation had been devoted to it.

University of Michigan palaeontologist Anne E. Kort, together with Jennifer Cavin of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, formally described the specimen in a paper published online in the Journal of Paleontology on 29 May 2026.

Known as JODA 3366, the specimen includes a complete cranium, an almost complete vertebral column in front of the sacrum, all the major limb bones and parts of both the forefeet and hindfeet. Only the tail and portions of the hands and feet are missing. It even preserves part of the baculum, or penis bone, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that the animal was male.

Creationism Refuted - Another Gap Is Closed by Science - With A Dinosaur From 210 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Musango matusadonaensis in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
Based on an illustration by Mark Witton.

When Musango matusadonaensis was alive, it would have lived alongside ancient rivers and streams.

© Mark Witton 2026

New Zimbabwean dinosaur species named by Museum scientist reveals Africa’s hidden history | Natural History Museum

It is gap-filling time again — not because palaeontologists have discovered some predetermined evolutionary “missing link”, but because another conspicuous blank on the palaeontological map is being filled. This time, the new evidence comes from Africa and concerns a dinosaur that lived about 210 million years ago, during the Late Triassic.

The discovery sheds new light on the early diversification and geographical distribution of dinosaurs, when they were still only a relatively minor component of terrestrial ecosystems. Over the following millions of years, they diversified into an extraordinary range of forms and became the dominant large land animals of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Gaps in the fossil record are, of course, eagerly seized upon by creationists desperate to find somewhere to insert their god. Their enthusiasm tends to diminish markedly whenever palaeontologists recover new evidence from one of those gaps. Each such discovery removes another supposed refuge for the ever-shrinking god of the gaps, so the evidence must be dismissed as misidentified, incorrectly dated or merely another example of “evolutionary storytelling”.

No matter how many gaps science fills, creationists continue to assure themselves that the next one will be different: that it will finally be the gap that science cannot investigate and into which their preferred creator can safely be inserted. Unfortunately for that strategy, palaeontologists continue to discover fossils, dating methods continue to improve, and previously neglected regions continue to be explored.

This latest discovery consists of a partial skeleton excavated from exposures of the Late Triassic Pebbly Arkose Formation on the shore of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. An international team of Zimbabwean, South African and British scientists has named the animal Musango matusadonaensis. The study was led by Professor Paul M. Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, while the expeditions during which the fossils were collected were led by Professor Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute.

Musango was an early sauropodomorph — a member of the lineage that later produced the enormous, long-necked sauropods such as Diplodocus. Unlike those gigantic four-legged descendants, however, Musango was a relatively lightly built, predominantly bipedal animal. It measured an estimated 4.5 metres in length but weighed only about 222 kilograms. Its skull has not been recovered, so its diet cannot be established with certainty, although comparisons with related dinosaurs suggest that it was probably herbivorous or omnivorous.

The fossil record of early dinosaurs is extremely uneven. Europe, North America and parts of South America have been studied far more intensively than much of Africa, leaving large gaps caused not necessarily by the absence of dinosaurs but by the scarcity of sustained palaeontological exploration. Musango is only the fifth dinosaur formally named from Zimbabwe, following the description in 2024 of another sauropodomorph from the same formation, Musankwa sanyatiensis.

Phylogenetic analysis places Musango and Musankwa as close relatives within Unaysauridae, a group whose fossils are known from Africa, India and South America — landmasses that were then joined within Gondwana. Together, these discoveries support an emerging picture in which Late Triassic southern Africa contained several distinct ecosystems with their own dinosaur communities, rather than a single uniform fauna extending across the region. Africa was therefore not a peripheral spectator in early dinosaur evolution; its still-underexplored rocks may preserve crucial evidence about how dinosaurs diversified and spread before their later ecological dominance.

How Snakes Lost Their Legs - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

Of all the primitive ‘just-so’ stories in Genesis, the tale of how the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly must rank among the most transparently mythological. Having supposedly tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, God curses the serpent to go on its belly and ‘eat dust’ for the rest of its life. Although the story never explicitly says that the serpent previously had legs, the curse plainly implies a change and has traditionally been understood as an explanation for why snakes slither instead of walking.

Like so much of Genesis, it begins with an observation familiar to its authors—snakes have no legs—and invents a magical tale to explain it. It is an ancient example of an etiological myth: folklore devised to explain why something in the natural world appears as it does, long before anyone had the evidence or intellectual framework needed to understand its real history.

Even as mythology, however, the story is strangely incoherent. Genesis itself does not identify the serpent as Satan but introduces it as the most cunning of the wild animals God had made. Nevertheless, this supposedly ordinary animal can speak, reason and somehow knows about a prohibition that God had given to Adam before Eve had even been created. The text makes no attempt to explain how it acquired either this knowledge or the power of speech.

More awkward still for anyone insisting that the story is literally true, the serpent’s predictions prove substantially more accurate than God’s warning. God tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats the fruit. The serpent tells Eve that they will not die, that their eyes will be opened and that they will become like God, knowing good and evil. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they do not die that day. God then confirms that the humans have indeed become ‘like one of us’ in knowing good and evil. According to Genesis itself, Adam goes on to live for another 930 years.

On the most straightforward reading of the story, therefore, the serpent tells Eve the truth while God’s threat to Adam proves false. Later theologians have attempted to rescue the tale by inventing a ‘spiritual death’, or by claiming that Adam merely began to die that day, but neither qualification appears in the text. These are apologetic repairs added by people who can see the problem but cannot admit that the story’s authors created it.

Science, meanwhile, has uncovered a very different account of how snakes acquired their extraordinary bodies—one involving neither talking reptiles nor fruit, curses or human disobedience, but descent with modification over immense periods of geological time. Snakes are highly modified members of the squamate reptile radiation. Their ancestors progressively elongated their bodies, increased the number of vertebrae and reduced their limbs as different lineages adapted to particular ways of life. Their evolutionary history extends back at least to the Middle Jurassic, about 160 million years ago.

Now, a paper published in Nature by an international team led by Tiago R. Simões describes an exceptionally well-preserved early snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Named Tametara mirim, the animal lived approximately 85–75 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs still dominated terrestrial ecosystems. It is the first articulated snake fossil known from Brazil and preserves a three-dimensional skull together with more than 100 connected vertebrae.

The preserved portion of its skeleton appears to have lacked forelimbs. Because the region around the pelvis is missing, the researchers cannot determine whether it retained vestigial hindlimbs, as some other early snakes did. Its skull also combines recognisably snake-like specialisations with ancestral features resembling those of other squamate reptiles—precisely the sort of mosaic of old and new characteristics expected in an evolving lineage, but not from the instantaneous transformation of an animal by a divine curse.

Refuting Creationism - How Storms Created A Dinosaur Fossil Site - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Graphical abstract

Fanti, Federico; Consorti, Lorenzo; Muscioni, Marco; et al (2026) (CC BY 4.0)

Tethyshadros insularis and crocodilians struggle against a violent monsoon storm.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site

Young-Earth creationists are fond of pointing out that a single flood or storm can deposit a layer of sediment very quickly, as though this somehow proves that the entire geological record could have been produced during the mythical year-long flood described in Genesis. But the speed with which an individual layer forms tells us nothing about the intervals between successive layers. When those layers contain regular, measurable cycles produced by processes operating daily, fortnightly and seasonally, they become a record of elapsed time—and that time cannot simply be waved away.

An article in The Conversation by palaeontologist Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza of University College London describes just such a record. It concerns the Villaggio del Pescatore fossil site near Trieste, north-eastern Italy, where dinosaurs, crocodilians, fish, shrimps, plants and other organisms were preserved with exceptional detail about 80 million years ago.

Chiarenza and his colleagues, led jointly with Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna, have published their findings in the journal Global and Planetary Change. Their evidence shows that the site was not, as previously proposed, a quiet lake or sinkhole. It was a tropical tidal flat on the edge of an ancient sea, repeatedly affected by powerful monsoon floods and tropical cyclones.

The fossil-bearing limestone consists of metre-thick packages containing thousands of discrete, paper-thin light and dark layers. These had previously been interpreted as annual deposits, or varves. However, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scanning, microscopic and geochemical analyses, and statistical analysis of the repeating patterns revealed something still more remarkable: the layers are tidal microcouplets, laid down under a semidiurnal tidal regime—two tidal cycles each day.

Moreover, variations in the thickness of the layers follow the familiar fortnightly alternation between spring and neap tides. The rocks therefore contain not merely a succession of vaguely similar bands, but an ordered astronomical rhythm produced by the interaction of Earth’s rotation with the orbit of the Moon. By counting and analysing those layers, the researchers calculated that the fossil-bearing succession accumulated over approximately 40 years. In other words, the rock preserves an almost day-by-day record extending across four decades.

That presents creationists with a problem that cannot be dismissed by claiming that “floods can deposit sediment rapidly”. Of course they can; that is precisely what some of the layers record. But a single flood cannot manufacture 40 years’ worth of successive twice-daily tidal deposits, arranged in the correct fortnightly spring–neap pattern. Still less can the supposed year-long biblical flood accommodate a geological sequence that records some 40 years of tides within one small part of a vastly larger, 80-million-year-old succession.

How Evolution Works - Shell Shock For Creationists

Steinkern (internal mould) of Maclurites neritoides containing cryptic fauna cornulitids, bryozoans, and graptolites (arrows).

Credit: Vinn, O., Wilson, M.A., Tinn, O. et al. (2026)

Empty seashells became new habitats 470 million years ago | University of Tartu

A paper just published in Scientific Reports by an international team led by Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, Estonia, provides a lovely illustration of the opportunistic nature of evolution.

Some 470 million years ago — almost 470 million years before creationists’ mythical ‘Creation Week’ — a seemingly modest ecological innovation occurred in the oceans: animals began using the sheltered interiors of empty mollusc shells as habitats. This happened during the Middle Ordovician, following the Cambrian radiation, and helped to establish a new ecological niche that remains important in marine ecosystems today.

Creationists like to misrepresent the Cambrian radiation as the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animals without ancestors. In reality, it was neither instantaneous nor without an evolutionary prehistory. It unfolded over tens of millions of years and grew out of changes already under way among the preceding Ediacaran biota, including increasing mobility, burrowing and ecological interaction.

As animals became more mobile, predation intensified and defensive structures became increasingly advantageous. Mineralised skeletons and shells evolved independently in several lineages, probably under several interacting pressures, including protection, structural support and changing ocean chemistry. Molluscs were among the groups that acquired shells, and their subsequent diversification produced such familiar forms as gastropods, bivalves and shelled cephalopods.

One consequence was the growing accumulation of empty shells on the seabed. Each dead mollusc left behind a hard surface and a sheltered cavity that other organisms could potentially exploit. Yet the researchers found that, throughout the Cambrian, the interiors of mollusc shells and other skeletal remains remained free of encrusting animals, even though organisms capable of living on surfaces inside other cavities already existed.

That changed during the Middle Ordovician, when attached animals began colonising the relatively large, spacious shells of nautiloid cephalopods. They later spread into the empty shells of gastropods and bivalves. No foresight or planning was required: once organisms capable of settling inside these shells gained access to a protected surface supplied with food-bearing water, any heritable tendency that improved their ability to exploit it could be favoured by natural selection.

Creationism Refuted - Earth Is 'Fine-Tuned' For Disasters And Mass Extinctions

Researchers confirm cause of Earth’s biggest mass extinction | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Studying the metabolism of living brachiopods like these collected from San Juan Island, Washington, allowed Stanford researchers to understand how the physiology of the modern fauna and Paleozoic fauna may have differed and how these groups would have been differentially impacted by oxygen and temperature changes during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction.

Image credit: Erik Sperling.

Many of Earth's climatic, geological and biological processes behave as complex, nonlinear systems, resembling systems in chaos. In this context, “chaotic” does not mean random. It means that small differences in starting conditions can sometimes be amplified until they produce very different outcomes — the phenomenon popularly known as the “butterfly effect”. The butterfly is not literally responsible for a distant storm; it merely illustrates how a tiny disturbance can cascade through a sufficiently complex system.

This is not the picture of a planet engineered to remain permanently benign or perfectly “fine-tuned” for life — still less for human life in the United States. Earth is habitable, but its habitability is contingent and sometimes precarious. The same interacting atmospheric, oceanic, geological and biological processes that sustain life can, when pushed beyond critical thresholds, drive abrupt environmental change, ecological collapse and mass extinction.

At several points in Earth's history, reinforcing feedbacks have transformed relatively small initial disturbances into rapid and profound environmental changes. Organisms adapted to the previous conditions were then confronted with combinations of heat, cold, acidification, oxygen loss or other stresses occurring too quickly for most populations to adapt. The result was widespread extinction.

What has been less well understood is why some groups were devastated while others living in the same changing environment survived. This is an important question for us because every organism alive today is descended from lineages that somehow survived every previous mass extinction.

Research by a Stanford University-led team, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), now offers an experimentally supported explanation for one of the most striking patterns associated with the end-Permian mass extinction — the “Great Dying” of about 252 million years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

Ai-generated image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Hagfish By LOSS of Eye Complexity

Feeding hagfish

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Confirms Evolution - And Falsifies Creationism

Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.

Alex Boersma

Fossil Trove Expands Range of Squishy Early Animals - American Museum of Natural History

A paper published on 20 May 2026 in Science Advances by a team of palaeontologists led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, very neatly illustrates the difference between evolutionary biology and creationism. It reports the discovery of a rich new Ediacaran fossil site in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories, containing fossils that appear earlier in the record, and in deeper-water settings, than current models of the Ediacaran biota had led palaeontologists to expect.

That is not a problem for evolution; it is how science progresses. Unexpected evidence does not destroy a scientific theory merely because it requires a refinement of detail. In this case, the discovery extends the known geographical, ecological and chronological range of part of the Ediacaran biota — the strange, mostly soft-bodied organisms that preceded, and helped set the stage for, the later Cambrian diversification of animal life.

When asked what would falsify the theory of evolution, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have replied, “a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian”. He was making the simple point that evolutionary theory predicts a broad historical sequence: mammals should not appear before vertebrates, vertebrates should not appear before animals, and rabbits should not appear hundreds of millions of years before their ancestors. A genuine rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be an anachronism so extreme that it would call the whole historical framework into question.

But that is not what palaeontologists have found here. The newly reported fossils are not out of sequence; they are exactly the kind of organisms that belong in late Precambrian rocks. The surprise is not that they are in the wrong part of life’s history, but that some of them appear a little earlier, in a wider geographical range, and in somewhat different environments than previously recognised. In other words, the anomaly is chronological and ecological, not evolutionary.

To a creationist, of course, the question of falsification has to be avoided, because the honest answer is deeply uncomfortable. The fossil record as a whole does not show a sudden magical creation of all living things a few thousand years ago. It shows succession: organisms appearing, diversifying, changing and disappearing through vast spans of geological time. The dating of the rocks, using multiple independent geological and radiometric methods, consistently points to an ancient Earth and a long history of life, not to a recent creation week followed by a global flood.

That is why every such discovery is awkward for creationism but routine for science. Fossils are not distributed randomly, as they would be if all life had been created at once and then jumbled together in a recent catastrophe. They occur in a recognisable sequence, constrained by stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, developmental biology and, for later organisms, genetics. The details are continually revised, but the broad pattern remains overwhelmingly consistent with evolution and wholly inconsistent with Biblical literalism.

By any honest application of the scientific method, that should be enough to falsify the creationist narrative beyond reasonable doubt. That it does not do so for creationists is not because the evidence is weak, but because the conclusion is protected from evidence. When the conclusion is sacred, facts become things to be explained away, misrepresented or ignored.

For evolutionary biologists, however, an unexpected fossil is not an embarrassment to be dismissed, but a clue to be investigated. If the evidence shows that part of the White Sea assemblage was present in Laurentia earlier than previously recognised, and in deeper-water environments, then the scientific response is to refine the model. The theory is not weakened by that process; it is strengthened, because it can absorb new evidence, generate better questions and produce a more accurate account of what happened.

The fossils described in this paper include more than 100 specimens, with several groups not previously recorded from North America, including Dickinsonia, Funisia, Kimberella and Eoandromeda. Some are estimated to be about 567 million years old, overlapping with the older Avalon assemblage and extending the known range of the White Sea assemblage by around 5–10 million years. The researchers also found that these organisms lived in deeper-water settings than had previously been recognised for this assemblage, supporting the idea that some early animal innovations may have begun offshore before spreading into shallower environments.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ken Ham Shows Us His Cult Is For Fools Who Believe Lies

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life.

The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:

The fossil record is the graveyard of the global flood. pic.twitter.com/1OWyNcEk5o

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) May 20, 2026

What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.

Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.

We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.

So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.

Refuting Creationism - Europe's Most Complete Stegosauria Skull - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration of Dacentrurus armatus.

Adrián Blázquez / Fundación Dinópolis.

Europe’s most complete stegosaurian skull unearthed in Teruel, Spain | Pensoft.blog

Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.

This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.

That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.

Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.

If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.

Creationism Refuted - A Giant, Intelligent Predatory Octopus - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A sketch of the giant octopus.

Image: Yohei Utsuki
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Hokkaido University.

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago – Hokkaido University

To a conspiracy-theorist creationist who sees science as an organised plot to trick them into changing their mind, it must seem that the whole world and its dog are ganging up on them. The “conspiracy” has now spread to a team of researchers led by Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, Japan, who have announced the discovery of fossilised jaws of giant octopuses that may have been apex predators in Late Cretaceous seas, about 100 million years before creationism’s mythical “Creation Week”. Some of these animals may have reached nearly 20 metres in length, making them among the largest invertebrates yet described.

To a creationist, apparently, it is more plausible to believe that a god self-assembled out of nothing, then made an entire universe out of nothing by magic just a few thousand years ago, than to accept that Earth and life on it are the result of long, slow, scientifically demonstrable natural processes. So, when the evidence says otherwise, the evidence must somehow be forged, misrepresented or misunderstood. Besides, Bronze Age people who thought the world was flat, with a solid dome over it, said so — and what better evidence could there be than that?

What the team of researchers from several Japanese research institutions, together with Jörg Mutterlose of Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, discovered was recently published in Science. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they identified fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period. The fossils, from Japan and Vancouver Island, date from between about 100 and 72 million years ago. They had been preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine details, including wear marks that reveal how these animals fed.

Based on the size and shape of the jaws, the researchers estimate that some of these extinct finned octopuses, especially Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, may have reached nearly 20 metres in total length. Their jaws show heavy chipping, scratching, cracking and polishing, consistent with repeated forceful biting into hard prey such as shells, bones or other resistant material. These were not passive, soft-bodied animals drifting harmlessly through the Cretaceous seas; they appear to have been powerful, active predators, competing in ecosystems otherwise assumed to have been dominated by large marine reptiles and sharks.

One especially intriguing finding was asymmetrical wear on the jaws. In two species, one side of the biting surface was more heavily worn than the other, suggesting that these animals may have favoured one side when handling difficult prey. This sort of behavioural lateralisation is associated in modern animals with complex neural processing, raising the possibility that advanced predatory behaviour, and perhaps a degree of intelligence, had already evolved in these early octopus relatives. The discovery also pushes the fossil record of finned octopuses back by about 15 million years, and the broader octopus record by about 5 million years.

How Science Works - Correcting A Mistake But Still Refuting Creationism

Ediacaran microbial mats

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Visible to the naked eye, fossilized bacteria or algae were found in an ancient seabed that emerged in the current Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul

Photo: Bruno Becker-Kerber/Harvard University

Microfossils interpreted as animal traces were actually algae and bacteria

A paper in Gondwana Research, recently highlighted in a FAPESP press release, helps illustrate one of the great strengths of science and one of the fatal weaknesses of creationism as a means of discovering the truth.

It reports the results of a reassessment of microscopic fossil evidence from the late Ediacaran, previously interpreted as evidence of burrowing, worm-like animals — possibly the earliest known meiofauna, a type of tiny animal life otherwise securely associated with the Cambrian fossil record.

The earlier interpretation also carried a secondary implication: that oxygen levels in those late Ediacaran marine environments may already have been high enough to support active, motile, multicellular animals. That conclusion now looks much less secure, because the structures appear not to be animal burrows at all, but fossilised communities of algae and bacteria.

That is where the real lesson lies. One of the attractions of creationism is that it offers a spurious sense of certainty to people who value certainty more than truth and accuracy — the so-called “certainty embracers”. To them, the fact that science sometimes corrects itself, and that scientists change their minds when new evidence becomes available, is misrepresented as a weakness. Creationism, by contrast, is treated as an unchanging, eternal truth precisely because it is protected from correction by refusing to submit itself to evidence.

Religion = unreasonable certainty
Science = Reasonable uncertainty

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Religion offers unreasonable certainty; science works with reasonable uncertainty. The difference is that science is amenable to reason, evidence and correction, while creationism survives by rejecting them whenever they become inconvenient.

So creationists often seize on cases where one team of scientists re-evaluates evidence relied upon by an earlier team and concludes that the original interpretation was wrong. But this is not science failing; it is science working. It is exactly what makes science such a powerful tool for discovering what is true: it can change its collective mind when better evidence, better techniques and better analysis point in a different direction.

Sadly for creationists, however, this improved understanding rarely, if ever, turns out to support their beliefs. They may derive a few crumbs of comfort from the familiar refrain that “Darwinists got it wrong again”, but there can surely be little comfort in discovering that the structures in question were still made by living organisms some 540 million years before creationist dogma says Earth existed.

The corrected interpretation does not rescue creationism; it simply replaces one natural explanation with a better-supported natural explanation. The fossils are still ancient. They are still biological. They are still part of a deep-time history of life that creationism cannot accommodate without special pleading. The only thing that has changed is the identity of the organisms responsible for them.

The reassessment was led by Dr Bruno Becker-Kerber as part of his post-doctoral research at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), supported by a fellowship from FAPESP — Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Living Fossil' - from 275 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Tanyka amnicola grazing

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)
(after an illustration by Vitor Silva

Fossils of jaw bones of Tanyka amnicola

Pardo, J.D; Marsicano, C.A; Smith, R.; et al (2026)

This ancient plant-eater had a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth - Field Museum

Creationists love so-called ‘living fossils’ because they imagine they show evolution has not happened and that Earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, by the twisted logic of creationism, the vast number of species that have changed over time somehow do not prove the opposite: that evolution does happen and that Earth is vastly older than a few thousand years.

Their argument also ignores the scientific definition of evolution: change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Without DNA from earlier members of the same lineage, it is impossible to say whether evolution has or has not occurred within that lineage. Superficial resemblance is not genetic stasis. But then, the creationist ‘definition’ of evolution is not the scientific one. It is a childish straw man parody, designed to be easier to attack.

So this latest ‘living fossil’, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a team led by Dr Jason D. Pardo of the Field Museum, Chicago, is bound to set up cognitive dissonance in creationists. That will probably result in their usual coping strategy: ignoring it altogether, or blaming scientists for trying to make them change their minds.

The fossil belongs to a new species, Tanyka amnicola, an archaic stem tetrapod from the Early Permian of Brazil, about 275 million years ago. It belonged to a lineage that had been thought to have disappeared much earlier, making it a “living fossil” even in its own time. The fossils were found in a dry riverbed in north-eastern Brazil, in the Pedra de Fogo Formation, one of the few windows scientists have into Gondwanan animal life during this period.

What the team found was not a complete skeleton but a set of fossil lower jaws — nine in all — each showing the same extraordinary feature: the jaw was twisted, with some teeth pointing sideways, while the inside of the jaw was lined with numerous small denticles that appear to have formed a grinding surface. Since all the jaws show the same structure, this was not a deformity or fossilisation artefact, but part of the animal’s normal anatomy.

The researchers suggest that this strange arrangement may have allowed Tanyka to process food in a highly unusual way. The Field Museum describes it as probably eating aquatic plants, while the paper itself leaves open the possibility that the jaw was adapted either for processing plant material or for specialised feeding on small invertebrates. Either way, this was not a static remnant of a bygone age, but a member of an ancient lineage still exploring new ecological possibilities in Permian Gondwana.